There are a number of ways to get distracted. Trust me, I know.
One such way is thinking, “I should make an audio slideshow,” writing a script, pulling out all the images from the November U.S. Presidential Election, editing them heavily, recording the damn thing, thinking “who the hell is going to hire me to do this?” and deleting it.
Another one? Making a video of myself making tea, putting it together complete with background music and credits, and showing it to a friend, calling it “Baby’s first video.” (She laughed and made fun of me.)
And another one? Editing every picture I’ve taken in the last two years. Seriously.
There’s a very good and highly successful multimedia program here at Berkeley, and in fact, I get the feeling most students are getting more multimedia training than they are journalism training. I thought I’d left IT behind once I graduated, but several of my peers are learning coding. Coding! (I exit the room very quickly.)
I’d become very conflicted lately. Everyone around me, especially in the J-school, keeps stressing the importance of knowing these technologies. The idea is to be a jack of all media. Know a little bit of everything. But if news websites are anything to go by, that leads to horrendous audio, video, photography, and sub-par reporting. (There are some very good multimedia examples, but they are almost always a team effort with everyone doing what they’re best at.)
Plus, I’m not a jack-of-all-trades kind of person. I’m obsessive to a fault. I’d rather be a writer and have a photographer and videographer with me. I’d rather argue over misplaced commas (even if I’m the one misplacing them) than arguing about how (or if) a photo should be cropped.
But in the absence of big budgets, even large publications are seeing a reporter as the writer, photographer, and videographer. As a freelancer, this is a problem. As an industry, it’s an even bigger problem.
There’s a lot of you-can’t-survive-if -you-don’t-know-multimedia in the air lately. I’m happily going to defy popular notions once again (I hope) and once and for all quit thinking about mediums I have little interest in (audio is the exception; I like audio).
I tell my stories best in words. For now, I’m keeping it that way.
If you’re interested in multimedia, though, here are some resources:
http://www.multimediashooter.com/
http://mindymcadams.com/tojou/
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